The Biafra Story

by Frederick Forsyth

  The other factor was perhaps the same one that gave the Frenchman his confidence. Sitting out in the Bight of Biafra, just off the coast, were five Soviet ‘trawlers’, or spy-ships, blossoming radio aerials and radar scanners. It was possibly one of these that had reported the incoming flight of Captain Brown two weeks earlier in time for the MiG to ‘scramble’ to intercept. As the São Tomé pilots overflew this flotilla in the dusk, they observed sitting in the midst of it a French aircraft carrier with a deck-full of jet fighters.

  The carrier had been on a routine courtesy call to Libreville when the trouble started. Without a word it quietly sailed from Libreville and anchored for two weeks between São Tomé and Biafra. The sight of it sitting there waiting (for what?) was immensely comforting for the relief pilots. Then on 20 June the MiGs suddenly stopped flying at night and strafing the airport. They never flew again against the JCA air bridge.

  While this work of life-saving was quietly being done by the Churches, the headlines had switched to the problems of the International Red Cross. Having won hands down against the Red Cross, the Nigerian régime was in a position to dictate terms, which it did. These included the handing-over of the whole relief operation in Nigeria to the Nigerian Rehabilitation Commission. There were by this time 1,400 foreign workers under the sign of the Red Cross working among the war-stricken on the Nigerian side of the line.

  The Red Cross, devoid of support from Britain or America, was forced to yield. Subsequently donations from outside for the relief work under Nigerian auspices predictably plummeted. Meanwhile the Red Cross timidly tried to negotiate for a resumption of their air bridge with Federal permission.

  On Wednesday 25 June Chief Awolowo commented that starvation was a legitimate weapon and that he was opposed to the shipment of relief supplies to the secessionists.* The next day the Chief of Staff of the Army, Brigadier Hassan Usman Katsina, was reported as saying, ‘Personally I would not feed somebody I am fighting.’†

  It was significant that the remarks of these two men, the latter of whom particularly had more power to influence events in Nigerian than twenty General Gowons, went completely unremarked by the British Government and largely by the Press. On 6 July, after a meeting in the Foreign Office in London between Mr Maurice Foley, Minister of State for the Commonwealth, Mr Okoi Arikpo, Nigerian Foreign Affairs Commissioner, and Professor Jacques Freymond, acting President of the ICRC, the Foreign Office issued a statement claiming that ‘complete agreement’ had been reached between the three for a new Red Cross airlift by day of relief food to Biafra. The plan involved Red Cross planes flying from Lagos, to which all relief foods would be imported.

  It was a particularly silly piece of mischief. Professor Freymond had flown home on the evening of 6 July and the first he learned of it was from the headlines in the British Press the next day, which reached Geneva about 9 a.m. There had been no joint communiqué the previous evening and the Foreign Office had acted entirely on its own. From Geneva the ICRC issued a vehement denial that there had been agreement between the three of them.

  What there had been in fact was an Anglo–Nigerian plan which the Red Cross had agreed to transmit to General Ojukwu and the Biafran Government. The claim that without any consultation with the Biafrans the Red Cross had agreed to it severely compromised the Red Cross in its pending negotiations with the Biafrans.

  This did not stop Mr Michael Stewart, speaking on 7 July in the House, putting the whole onus of whether or not the Biafran children got fed onto General Ojukwu, a ploy which by this time had become standard practice. In fact, the Biafrans, after considering the plan transmitted to them by the Red Cross, rejected it. The plan would have put the whole relief operation under Lagos’ sole control, without any proscription against taking advantage of the opening of Uli during daylight hours to mount an attack against this prime target under cover of the relief flights.

  The Red Cross went back to square one and started on its own. On 19 June Dr Lindt had formally resigned in order to give the Red Cross negotiations a better chance of success.

  On 1 July the new President of the International Committee of the Red Cross took office. He was M. Marcel Naville, a banker who had been on the Committee for several years, had been elected President some months previously, but could only be inaugurated on 1 July. That day in Geneva he gave a remarkably passionate and forthright press conference. He criticized the Nigerian régime as ‘insolent… showing a humanitarian the door like an unfaithful servant’. He lambasted the gun-merchants whose supplies of weapons had kept the war going, and without naming names suggested there was not enough oil in all Nigeria to make the detergent needed to cleanse the hands of the men responsible. Observers felt he was either a very rash man, or had foreknowledge of some powerful diplomatic backing that would enable him to win a showdown with the Lagos junta once and for all.

  In the event the first judgement was the correct one and, unfortunately, besides his rashness, M. Naville showed he had little strength of character. In subsequent debate inside the committee, the more timid spirits won the day. The result was a communiqué stating that the ICRC would pursue the path of ‘strict legality’, which in the circumstances meant complete inertia.

  A series of protracted and laborious negotiations began, while east of the Niger the children continued to die. On 8 July M. Naville himself headed the ICRC negotiating team to Lagos, pointedly cancelling a trip to London en route. He was soon back with nothing achieved, and the talks passed into the hands of M. Enrico Beniami, the senior ICRC delegate in Lagos. For weeks the talks got nowhere.

  On 4 August the Red Cross did what it should have done at the outset. It produced its own compromise plan. This plan provided for Red Cross planes to take off from Cotonou in Dahomey, overfly Nigeria down a specific air corridor, deposit the relief food at Uli and return to Cotonou over Nigeria down another air corridor. Flights would be between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. and would be protected. Cargo content would be verified during loading and just before take-off by a mixed commission including Nigerian staff, who might if they wished even accompany each flight to ensure there were not diversions.

  This business of Nigerian representatives accompanying each flight to prove there was nothing of any remote military significance on board (ostensibly the Nigerians’ main complaint) was what Ojukwu had proposed in July 1968.

  The plan was put to Ojukwu first. For him it contained certain risks, as his security advisers were quick to point out. Firstly, with daylight flights operating, the pressure on JCA to discontinue its ‘illegal’ night flights would be immense. If the night air bridge was dismantled and JCA joined in the daylight run, what would happen if the Lagos Government then unilaterally rescinded the agreement? Relief would be wholly cut off. Secondly, although the agreement specified that the flights and the airstrip should be inviolable between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., would anybody guarantee that no attack would be made by the Federal Air Force in contravention of the agreement? Such an attack, if made from a freighter with an especially heavy bomb, could wreck the airfield. Significantly no power, least of all those who screamed loudest about the integrity of the Federal regime, was prepared to consider such a guarantee.

  Nevertheless, and despite opposition from within his own cabinet, Ojukwu decided to take a risk. On 29 August Biafra finally agreed to the plan. Delighted, the Red Cross took the plan to Lagos. At this point a bit of international backing for the Red Cross could have swung the issue in favour of their own compromise plan. None was forthcoming. The Federal régime objected to the plan unless certain changes were made. This was where the Red Cross made another of its major mistakes. It should have insisted the plan remain unchanged by either party. On 5 September Lagos agreed to the plan ‘in principle’ providing a few technical details could be worked out. On 14 September Lagos signed the agreement, with its own changes included in the text. The agreement was then shunted back to Ojukwu.

  Any consumer organization will stress to its customers th
e importance of the small print on a legal document. The new agreement on daylight flights contained five extra paragraphs of small print, which substantially changed the spirit and letter of the original. Three may be mentioned.

  One cut the flying time back to 5 p.m., cutting the possible flights per plane per day from two to one. Another specified that Lagos control tower could at any time call down any relief plane flying over Nigerian territory for supplementary inspection, after which the plane would have to go back to Cotonou still laden. The third specified that the agreement ‘should in no way prejudice military operations’ against Uli.

  The last two conditions virtually undid the original agreement. The first left the day-to-day continuance of the relief operation to the sole discretion of the Federal government; the second exempted the actual airfield of Uli from inviolability from attack during relief flying hours. How the relief aircraft were supposed to land with Uli under jet attack was anybody’s guess.

  On 11 September, however, another and more sinister document came into the hands of the ICRC in Geneva. It was a photostat copy of an order from the Commander of the Federal Air Force, Colonel Shittu Alao, instructing his base commanders at Enugu, Port Harcourt, Calabar and Benin to have their MiGs ‘patrol’ Uli during daylight hours, and if they were fired upon to go into the attack. This sent a shiver down the Committee’s collective spine.

  It needed little imagination to foresee that patrolling jets overhead were bound to be fired at by some nervous gunner. What would they see on the ground? Long, inviting columns of Red Cross trucks lined up waiting for relief supplies, parked airplanes on the aprons, scores of European Red Cross staff. One of the advisers with experience of Biafra pointed out that not only would a MiG attack on such a target in broad daylight result in a bloodbath involving European personnel, but that the enraged Biafrans could turn on the Red Cross staff and vent their bitterness on them. In that event, the adviser told the Committee, the responsibility would devolve on Geneva.

  It was almost with a sigh of relief that the Committee learned in late September that, thanks to the extra clauses, the Biafrans had refused the amended draft. There the matter rested until the end of 1969. The Churches continued flights by night, and, by the end of 1969, with a steadily expanded airlift and more planes expected, had brought their tonnage up from an original 150 tons a night in July to nearly 200 tons in December.

  In essence the whole daylight flight plan, its success or its abysmal and possibly bloody failure, depended not on assurances from Lagos but on the honourableness of the Federal Air Force. This was the same air force that for two years had shocked and angered the world by the brutality of its raids on markets, hospitals, clinics, refugee camps and townships; that had repeatedly broken truces called by General Gowon himself; and had finally excelled itself by shooting down an unarmed Red Cross freighter in cold blood.

  General Ojukwu was once again accused of playing politics with his people’s lives, a hoary chestnut but still usable in Whitehall and Washington. The accusation hardly stands up. On refusing the daylight airlift scheme General Ojukwu in person was once again the butt of bad publicity. A man concerned with playing politics would have acted in precisely the opposite way, seeking the world’s favour rather than its odium. For him there were not one but two considerations that had to be borne in mind. One was Biafra’s security, which was for the Biafrans primordial, and of which Uli airport was the cornerstone. Relief came second to security, and the bulk of the Biafrans agreed with this order of priorities.

  The tragedy of the Red Cross during 1969 was that it failed to understand the two immutables of the Nigerian–Biafra situation. One was that Ojukwu could not compromise the national security even for relief aid; the other was that the Nigerian armed forces chiefs, who stood looking over the shoulder of the government, would never permit the transmission of relief aid to Biafra other than in conditions that offered themselves a substantial military advantage.

  THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION

  It would be difficult if not impossible to imagine a more generous hearted or compassionate people than those of the United States of America. Thus it was no coincidence that when the plight of the suffering children on both sides of the Nigeria–Biafra war came to the notice through the American Press of the people of the United States, their contribution exceeded that of all other countries even on a pro rata basis of population.

  And yet the Government of the United States, guided by the dead hand of the State Department, remained steadfast in its support of Nigeria regardless of the cost in lives involved in the war. The reason for this strange dichotomy lies in one simple fact: almost every dime and cent brought forth by the American Government to aid the suffering on both sides had to be almost literally ground out of the authorities by public pressure.

  By the time it ceased operations the International Red Cross had received cash and gift contributions of over 19 million dollars from Washington. By the end of 1969 the Joint Churches had received in the same form about 60 million dollars’ worth of aid. The total contribution by the United States to relief was just over half the global total.

  Much of the aid was in kind; enormous donations of Corn-Soya-Milk, known as CSM or Formula Two, a newly devised relief food in light powder form, of which the US Government is the sole producer, were sent. Shipping costs across the Atlantic were paid in cash. Four C-97 Stratofreighters (they were originally announced as Globemasters, which proved too heavy) were sold to the ICRC and the Churches for a nominal 3,800 dollars each. Air shipment and running costs for these planes were also paid in dollars, and later air bridge costs for US cargoes in non-US planes were also reimbursed by America.

  To watch this effort going on was extremely heartening to those who knew that each sack and each dollar meant another bunch of children with a chance of life who would otherwise have died. Yet throughout the operation the State Department itself dragged its feet in almost every conceivable manner.

  What was sent was never on the basis of the need involved, or the size of the emergency, but simply on the basis of what would be enough to satisfy American internal domestic pressure while not going so far as to upset the régime in Lagos. Just why the immensely powerful State Department felt obliged to exert itself not to upset these tiny demagogues will presumably always remain a mystery.

  Despite his brave words of September 1968, President Richard Nixon, after coming to power, was personally responsible for the square root of nothing being sent to Nigeria–Biafra. The donations resulted from pressure from Press, Congressmen and Senators, and many others in public life who were in a position to exert influence. Even the sale of the eight freighters was one of the last decrees of the outgoing Johnson administration.

  Early in 1969 Dr Clarence Clyde Ferguson, Professor of Law at Rutger’s University, and a Negro, was named as Special Coordinator of Nigeria Relief. For the rest of that year he and his team by and large wasted their own and everyone else’s time, and got remarkably little done. Just after the shooting down of Captain Brown on 5 June, when an expansion of the JCA airlift (which, although not perfect, was at least getting the job done) was vital, Dr Ferguson chose to downplay the airlift. He spent his energies trying to push through his own pet project for running two landing craft laden with relief supplies up the Cross River into Biafra.

  Technically the plan could have worked, and two such landing craft, the Donna Mercedes and the Donna Maria, were sent across the Atlantic to Lagos. As General Ojukwu had agreed to the plan, the Nigerians vetoed it, using as trouble-shooters the puppet government they had installed at Calabar on the south of the Cross River. The landing craft ended up on unspecified duties in Nigerian-occupied Port Harcourt. For the rest, Dr Ferguson pottered round West Africa, shuttled between Nigeria and Biafra, flew to Europe and Washington, and back again. On one occasion he tried to put through his own plan for daylight flights, but omitted to warn the Red Cross who were already negotiating this idea.

  The people who r
eally did do something were the Americans of Joint Church Aid (USA). The American government aid was sent through three main agencies: USAID of the State Department, UNICEF of the United Nations, and JCA/USA. The last-named procured and transmitted the great bulk of the aid.

  Those in this organization who had to liaise with the State Department over the allocations left no doubt in the minds of inquirers later that in their view the Department, if left alone, would have been happy to stop the lot. Fortunately they were not allowed to. It has been necessary earlier to deal harshly with certain servants of the American people for the things they got up to in Lagos and Geneva. There is not a shadow of doubt that these ignoble antics were not know to the American people and would not have received their support had they been known.

  In the State Department itself there were eventually three separate offices dealing with the Nigeria–Biafra situation. One was the Nigeria Desk, an offshoot of the West Africa Desk, but heavily staffed with the former colleagues of ex-Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Mr Joseph Palmer. Mr Palmer, a former ambassador to Nigeria, had long been a firm supporter of Nigeria, regardless of the fact that since his day that country had deteriorated into just another dictatorship. Not surprisingly the Nigeria Desk, even in Mr Palmer’s absence (he was sent off as ambassador to Libya during 1969), was strongly pro-Nigerian and anti-Biafran. This was fully in harmony with the reports flowing back from Mr Elbert Matthews, the American ambassador in Lagos, who was relieved only at the end of 1969. Down the corridor was the AID office and further on was Dr Ferguson’s office. To the surprise of the JCA/USA staff who had to deal with all three, none of them seemed to know what the other was up to or what it was saying as its official ‘line’. The result was a fair degree of confusion.